Today is the tenth anniversary of this blog.
It was originally called “Views from Medina Road,” from where we lived in Woodland Hills (a suburb of Los Angeles) at the time, with the view of the San Fernando Valley, and the snow-topped San Gabriel Mountains in the distance.
Here’s the first post. All it said was “This is the initial post on my new blog, a sequel to the Locus Online editorial blog Views from Medina Road.”
Unfortunately that link, at locusmag.com, doesn’t work; but since then I moved that entire blog my own domain, markrkelly.com, here.
It’s odd that there was an almost four-month gap between the two. In July 2013 I had been laid off from my industry job of 30 years for about eight months, since November 2012, and then spent the early part of 2013 getting sfadb.com up and running smoothly.
Later, moving to Oakland in January 2015, it was easy enough to change the blog title, and header photo.
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For today, another run through of recent items in the news and commentariat.
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The Daily Beast, 12 Jul 2023: Ex-Fox Execs Lament Helping Murdoch Create ‘Disinformation Machine’
No more need be said.
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How to say “I have no understanding of what science is or how it works” without using those words.
Media Matters, 12 Jul 2023: Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles: “Science is mostly fake”, subtitled “Knowles: ‘The whole endeavor of the scientific revolution, the premise of which is that reality is fundamentally physical, that is flawed'” [sic]
On the contrary, it’s precisely right, and it’s given him the technology to broadcast his lame-brained opinions to the world, to those who need to believe them.
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More Republicans who want to control other people’s lives, because Republicans know better. Freedom!
NY Times, opinion by Jane Coaston, 11 Jul 2023: The Republican Governor of Utah Wants to Spare Kids From Their Phones
An interview with that governor, Spencer Cox. I would give his sincerity the benefit of the doubt if he were as worried about guns as about social media.
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Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 6 Jul 2023: Fake “liberal” Twitter account exposed: We should worry less about AI and more about human stupidity, subtitled “‘Erica Marsh’ was obviously not real, but MAGA Twitter just can’t quit their addiction to disinformation”
Feed them what they want to hear, they will lap it up. This is true of most people, but more so of conservatives, who are ideologically, not evidentiary, driven.
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More debate about the Supreme Court decision that said to correct past racism, one must ignore future racism.
NY Times, Charles M. Blow, 5 Jul 2023: The Supreme Court Didn’t Put Racism on a Leash. It Granted It License.
His opening line is a key theme of not only American, but all history, I suspect.
There is a recurrent theme in American history: the clawing back of hard-won progress.
Two steps forward, one step back. Three, two. And so on. Yet civilization does move forward. A century ago the conservatives in America were railing about women getting the vote. A century from now…? The trend is, what worries one generation of pearl-clutching conservatives becomes taken for granted two or three generations later. Yet conservatives will always find something to be upset about.
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Finally, a couple palette-cleansing posts involving Robert Reich and Paul Krugman.
AlterNet, Alex Henderson, 11 Jul 2023: Robert Reich: A ‘general sense of dread’ is souring Americans on a strong economy
Henderson actually mentions a Krugman subscriber-newsletter from early June that I don’t think I’ve linked: Making Manufacturing Great Again, and then to the Robert Reich Guardian item that I linked to and quoted from two days ago.
(It’s curious how Henderson identifies the two as “liberal” and “left-of-center”; I would describe them as reality-based, as opposed to conservatively ideological. But that’s what those terms seem to mean these days: liberal as reality-based, conservative as ideologically-based.)
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And finally, this key dis-abusement of a common conservative trope: that “people don’t want to work these days.” It’s simply not true. (Any more than “kids these days” isn’t more true now than in generations past.)
NY Times, Paul Krugman, 10 Jul 2023: No, ‘Socialism’ Isn’t Making Americans Lazy
Bernie Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot, had some negative things to say about his fellow Americans in an interview last December. “Socialism,” he opined, has destroyed the work ethic: “Nobody works. Nobody gives a damn. ‘Just give it to me. Send me money. I don’t want to work — I’m too lazy, I’m too fat, I’m too stupid.’”
You’re naïve if you think his take is exceptional. Without question, rich men are constantly saying similar things at country clubs across America. More important, conservative politicians are obsessed with the idea that government aid is making Americans lazy, which is why they keep trying to impose work requirements on programs such as Medicaid and food stamps despite overwhelming evidence that such requirements don’t promote work — but do create red-tape barriers that deny help to people who really need it.
I’m not under the delusion that facts will change such people’s minds. But everyone else should know that over the past year we have, in effect, conducted a huge test of the proposition that Americans have become lazy. And it turns out that they haven’t.
And of course the prime evidence for this is the currently very low unemployment rate. And note this:
We’ve also seen a surge in foreign-born workers. Whatever the likes of Ron DeSantis may think, immigrants are a big plus for the U.S. economy: They tend to be both working-age and highly motivated. Indeed, DeSantis’s anti-immigrant policies are already having a visible adverse effect on the Florida economy.
Krugman concludes,
The larger point is that despite what grumpy rich men may say, Americans haven’t become lazy. On the contrary, they’re willing, even eager, to take jobs if they’re available. And while economic policy in recent years has been far from perfect, one thing it did do — to the nation’s great benefit — was give work a chance.
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I wonder if this attitude that people are too lazy to work, that government programs to help the poor are detrimental because the poor have done something wrong and deserve their place in life, isn’t derived from the deeply cynical religious idea that humans are fundamentally flawed and need to be saved. By religion of course.
Of course that makes no sense in an evolutionary sense. But most conservatives, just like Michael Knowles, don’t understand science, let alone evolution, or refuse to.
